I’ve written about Google Classroom’s originality reports in the past. I’ve also posted tutorials on looking for matching documents via Google Drive. This week, thanks to Mike Tholfsen, I learned that my Microsoft-using friends have a similar feature available to them via the online version of Microsoft Word.
The similarity checker in Microsoft Word uses Bing to determine if there is a match or strong similarity between what a student puts in his or her document and a publicly available webpage. You can see a full overview of how the similarity checker works by watching this video produced by Mike Tholfsen.
It is important to note that the similarity checker in the online version of Microsoft Word is only available to paying Office 365 subscribers and not to users of free Office 365 accounts. I decided to write this blog post anyway because I know that many of you reading this are working in schools that do have paid Office 365 accounts.
